Am I a genius?

In the narrow sense, a genius has an IQ of about 140 or above, which is roughly 1 person in 261. That is the sense Lewis Terman used in 1916 when he labelled scores above 140 "near genius or genius". Only a supervised IQ test can tell you your number.

In the wider sense, genius means outstanding creative achievement, and IQ is only part of it. Researchers who study eminent people, such as Dean Keith Simonton, find that many acknowledged creators had IQs below 140, and that ability, sustained commitment and original ideas together do more to explain achievement than IQ alone.

Genius as a very high IQ

When Lewis Terman revised the Stanford-Binet in 1916 he labelled scores above 140 “near genius or genius”. That label is historical, and it is the source of the popular idea that genius starts at an IQ of 140. There is no official line. Modern tests describe the top of the scale differently, and scores that high are hard to measure reliably.

Genius as achievement

Historians and psychologists who study genius mostly mean something else: a person whose work changes a field or a culture. Dean Keith Simonton, who has spent a career on the subject, defines genius either as superlative intelligence or as achieved eminence, and points out that the two do not line up neatly. Some acknowledged creative geniuses had IQs below 140.

By that second meaning, nobody can tell you that you are a genius today. It is a judgement about a body of work, made by others, often long after the work is done.

Here is what share of people reach each IQ, on the standard scale with an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.

Above about 145 these are extrapolations from a bell curve. Tests have too few people in their norm groups at that level to measure it reliably, and different tests give different numbers for the same person.

Joseph Renzulli argued that the giftedness that leads to achievement is where three things overlap: above-average ability, task commitment and creativity. This quiz asks five statements about each, so you can see which ring is strongest for you. A statement counts as a match when you choose “Mostly” or “Very me”.

Studies of eminent creators and scientists find a pattern. High intelligence helps, particularly for learning and abstract reasoning, but it does not separate the people who change a field from those who are simply very capable. What does is expertise built over years, persistent effort and original thinking.

Older estimates of the IQs of famous historical figures, such as the 1926 study by Catharine Cox, were made retrospectively from biographies and are weak evidence. Our own historical IQ profiles use the same caution: they are estimates with a stated range and level of confidence, not measurements.

• Supervised test. The WAIS is the standard adult assessment. A score of 140 or more is rare, and a psychologist will explain the confidence interval around it.
• Mensa. Mensa's threshold is the top 2%, which is about 130 to 131. It is not a genius test, but it is a checkable milestone. See the Mensa practice test guide.
• Existing scores. The score converters estimate an IQ range from an SAT, ACT, GRE or similar score.
• Other people who have been called geniuses. Browse our historical IQ estimates and fictional characters.